Monday, November 15, 2010

Where did the beauty come from?

What is the transition between things as they are (with objects, molecular structures; with thoughts, bio-chemical reactions?) and things as they seem (happiness, joy, love, anger)?

I sit in a parking lot and see all these things. None made with anything but self-interest (perhaps). And yet, the things provide pleasure, opportunities for human interaction, joy, and sometimes negative emotions.

I have a couple of yogurt cartons on my desk filled with random objects (pliers, tweezers, knife, emery board, etc.) In one sense, these are just structures. And in another sense, they are dancers creating form, movement, and emotion.

At the moment of conception a life starts (maybe). We sense that was the beginning of "I." And yet what is the connection between I and the physical organism?

These are the questions I have that put me in a quandary. How can the two intertwined worlds coexist without any apparent connection to each other?

Tonight I heard that when the hands join in gassho it symbolizes the bringing together of the different parts of the body.

Maybe it is the delusion that things are what they seem that keeps us sane?

You put dumb old words on a piece of paper and you might have a "knock-out" poem. Where did the beauty come from?

4 comments:

Today I read “For me now, any question of identity becomes profound and difficult. Without memory you lose the idea of who you are. I am struggling more than ever to find answers to question of identity. I am flooded with early memories preserved in protected places of my brain where Alzheimer’s does not reign supreme. These memories become the last remnants of my search for who I am,” from Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s by Thomas DeBaggio

Beauty is a difficult reality. There is of course the obvious and fleeting beauty that is the provenance of youth and health and sexual attraction. But then there is also that other kind of beauty that we see in a sunset and landscape. And then there is the even more esoteric beauty that can be seen in dank alleys and broken buildings, rusty metal and half rotted dolls. Beauty is not gravity. Beauty is entirely a quality of perception and has no reality beyond human perceptions and values. So maybe the question is what are the values and perceptions that define what beauty is? Nature seems always to be beautiful. The play of light as it illuminates reality speaks of something a step beyond explaining. The beauty of the human form is the lesson of endeavor and the object of desire. Beauty is the coded message of the physical that points to the divine.